Based in Batesville, Arkansas, Pro Se Productions has become a leader on the cutting edge of New Pulp Fiction in a very short time.

Pulp Fiction, known by many names and identified as being action/adventure, fast paced, hero versus villain, over the top characters and tight, yet extravagant plots, is experiencing a resurgence like never before. And Pro Se Press, publishing New Pulp since August, 2011, is a major part of the revival, one of the reasons that New Pulp is growing by leaps and bounds!

Pro Se is the place to find Super Heroes, Explorers, Fairies, Werewolves, Men's Men, and Femme Fatales. Specializing primarily in prose books, anthologies, and magazines, Pro Se has made a commitment to 'Put the Monthly Back into Pulp' and continues to do that successfully, producing at least one New Pulp work every month!

Pro Se is an innovator in New Pulp, continually refining its presentation and product and working on exciting new veins of New Pulp to bring to readers and fans of all ages everywhere!

Free From Pro Se- Academic Essay Featuring Pro Se's 'Black Pulp'

It is always a wonderful experience when We find out how much a work from Pro Se influences or impacts someone. The following paper is written by Pro Se Author and Editor Percival Constantine for a class in pursuit of his Masters in English and Creative Writing with a Screenwriting Concentration. The paper is entitled 'Darkest Africa: A Racial Analysis of Pulp Jungle Heroes Tarzan and Mtimu'. Mtimu is a character created by Charles Saunders and featured in Pro Se's BLACK PULP Anthology.

Despite their influence on
popular culture and longevity, the pulps have never been particularly
well-regarded by the literary establishment. In the Journal of
Social History, Jay Hopler of Purdue University writes:

My reluctance to read the work
of writers like Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel and W.T. Ballard was a
result of having been told by every academic I had ever encountered that it was
completely worthless, not just as art, but even as schlock fiction. ‘They can't
even do good garbage,’ one of my colleagues declared during one of our many
discussions on the subject. … With the notable exception of Raymond Chandler,
Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald, that hard-boiled trio the snooty,
gate-keeping literati eventually embraced as delightfully cynical American
modernists, the authors of hard-boiled detective fiction were not to be taken
seriously (459-60).

Hopler’s reluctance to even
look at the pulps showcases the literary establishment’s tendency to turn up
their noses at those stories, and it is hard to judge them too harshly on this
subject: there were many magazines that featured badly-written stories and also
contained archaic depictions of race.
Without fail, the protagonists of the pulps were almost always white
men. Women and minorities were
never the heroes, and were often presented in stereotypical fashion. While there were some exceptions, pulp
fiction was dominated by white male authors and characters. Hopler, quoting Erin A. Smith’s Hard-boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp
Magazines, defines the pulp readership thusly:

Ms. Smith makes a convincing
argument that the readers of pulp fiction in the 20s, 30s and 40s were
“primarily...white, male, often immigrant, and working-class” (16). These readers, according to
Smith, were concerned with finding and keeping jobs that provided them with as
much autonomy and money as possible, with asserting their manliness and keeping
women in their traditional places—they used the stories published in the pulp
magazines to find ways to quell their anxieties.

The use of stereotypes has long
been common in not only pulp fiction, but also pop culture as a whole. In “Racial Formations,” Michael Omi and
Howard Winant point out that “Television’s tendency to address the ‘lowest
common denominator’ in order to render programs ‘familiar’ to an enormous and
diverse audience leads it to regularly assign and reassign racial
characteristics to particular groups, both minority and majority” (13). Popular culture not only reflects
racial prejudices, but sometimes also perpetuates them, so it is little surprise
that Burroughs’ target audience of white, working class males would find the
racial components of Tarzan of the Apes
appealing.

But the modern-day pulp writers
are attempting to present a new face.
Pro Se Productions, one of the new pulp fiction publishers, is leading
the charge with the publication of Black
Pulp, an anthology featuring a number of established and independent
authors penning pulp stories, but with black protagonists. The focus of this essay will be
“Mtimu,” a story by Charles R. Saunders, and a comparison of that story with
its obvious influence, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes.
Like Tarzan, Mtimu was raised in the jungles of “Darkest Africa,” but
there are a number of differences between the two, the most obvious one being
their race.

Tarzan of the Apes and Burroughs’ successive novels feature some of
the worst examples of racism in literature, and much has been written about
them. Despite being raised by
apes, Tarzan nonetheless becomes incredibly civilized in a remarkably short
amount of time. Burroughs presents
this as a condition of Tarzan’s lineage, being a descendant of English
nobility, and John Newsinger has stated as much: “it is not Tarzan’s humanity
that allows him to master his environment, but his English aristocratic
heritage that runs in his blood and has been passed on by his forebears
(60). He discovers the cabin he
and his parents lived in for a short period and becomes transfixed by the books
his father had brought from England.
Simply by studying the words, he learns to read, which Burroughs admits
in the narration that this is “a task which might seem to you or me impossible”
(Ch. 7). After a few years, by the
time he’s eighteen, Tarzan “read fluently and understood nearly all he read in
the many and varied volumes on the shelves” (Ch. 9). Newsinger writes of Tarzan: “To all intents and purposes, he
is a wild beast, but somehow he manages to overcome his savage upbringing and
eventually emerges a primitive but still recognizable English gentleman” (60).

Burroughs portrays Tarzan in
stark contrast to the black characters in the book, in particular the Mbonga
tribe, who are cannibalistic savages.
One of them, Kulonga, kills Kala, the ape who adopted Tarzan. To avenge his adoptive mother, Tarzan
stalks and lynches Kulonga. Now
presented with the opportunity to eat his prey, Tarzan hesitates. “All he knew was that he could not eat
the flesh of this black man, and thus hereditary instinct, ages old, usurped
the functions of his untaught mind and saved him from transgressing a worldwide
law of whose very existence he was ignorant” (Ch. 9). Whereas the Mbongans are depicted as cannibals, Tarzan finds
himself unable to partake in that same habit. Jeff Berglund discusses this key difference between Tarzan and
the Mbongans:

What impels him at this point
more than anything, the narrator makes clear, is his inherited instinct for
right and wrong. His advanced
Anglo-Saxon stock, which still courses through his arteries despite close to
twenty years of jungle education, encodes for him a superior morality. This Darwinian survival of the most
moral is continually repeated throughout the later parts of the novel,
particularly when Tarzan is faced with the rescue and protection of others like
himself (58).

The white savage (Tarzan) is
depicted as more civilized and moral than the black savages (the
Mbongans). Berglund notes that the
only other black character in the book is Esmerelda, a servant of Jane’s. But Esmerelda’s depiction is also
stereotypical, “a heavy, buffoonish, hysterical mammy, the foil to Jane’s
slender, beautiful, and proper white womanhood” (60). Berglund also makes an interesting observation about
Tarzan’s relationship with the Mbongans, the first humans he sees: “Why does
Tarzan not write to the Mbongans? … Tarzan doesn’t hesitate for a second before
scrawling a message to the whites who have ransacked his house. If he intuits that writing is a product
of humans, why does he refrain from using it with other humans?” (60). This is an important feature, and
Berglund is right to draw attention to it. After Tarzan kills Kulonga, he clearly recognizes him as a
man. “Had not his books taught him
that he was a man? And was not The
Archer a man, also?” (Burroughs Ch. 9).
As far as Tarzan’s experience is concerned, English is the only language
of man, but he never attempts to use it with the Mbongans. Instead, he steals from their village
and terrorizes them, but when it comes time to face the whites, he is initially
suspicious but quickly becomes a protector of them.

The message Tarzan writes to
the whites is also worth noting: “This is the house of Tarzan, the killer of
beasts and many black men” (Ch. 13).
Berglund points out the meaning of Tarzan’s name in the ape language:
white skin. Substituting that
meaning for Tarzan’s name in the note and what we are left with is white skin
is the killer of black men (68).
Despite their designation in the narration as human, the way Burroughs
has Tarzan treat the black characters suggests that he views them as little
more than animals. Newsinger also
notes the difference between the Mbongans and Tarzan on the subject of
cannibalism and how it serves to set them apart:

Tarzan’s humanity is
distinguished from that of the blacks.
Their humanity is of a lower order. They are part of the African darkness, incapable of rising
from it, at least through their own efforts. … They are, in fact, numbered
among the jungle’s savage inhabitants, as part of the wildlife (62).

Esmerelda does not fare much
better in this depiction, because she is nothing more than a servant and cannot
do anything for herself. In fact,
she seems to need Jane more than Jane needs her and “Tarzan regards her as some
sort of domesticated animal, as a pet black” (62). Tarzan judges almost exclusively based on skin color, as
proven in this exchange with Paul D’Arnot, the French Naval Officer whom Tarzan
saves and who then tutors Tarzan in the ways of civilization:

“Maybe they are friends,”
suggested D’Arnot.

“They are black,” was Tarzan’s
only reply (Burroughs Ch. 25).

Tarzan’s first instinct upon
seeing a black man is to view him as an enemy, he does not even consider the
possibility that they could be similar to him or possibly even helpful to him
and D’Arnot. Instead, Tarzan is
much more willing to kill them before they can even see him.

The ways in which Burroughs
sets up the different statuses of blacks and whites figures directly into early
twentieth century ideas on race. Tarzan of the Apes was first published
in serial format in 1912, and so the Civil War and slavery were still part of
recent American history, and an era when blacks were considered subhuman.

Some may argue that works such
as Tarzan of the Apes should simply
be left in the past, not revisited.
The popular notion seems to be that the pulps were drivel, with very,
very politically incorrect depictions of racial minorities, and so the culture
should move past that. In
“Blueprint for Negro Literature,” Richard Wright discussed the problem of black
literature in the past:

Negro writing in the past has
been confined to humble novels, poems, and plays, decorous ambassadors who go
a-begging to white America. They entered the Court of American Public Opinion
dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was
not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of
other people. These were received as poodle dogs who have learned clever
tricks. … In short, Negro writing on the whole has been the voice of the
educated Negro pleading with white America (ChickenBones).

A book titled Black Pulp, which serves to cast black
characters in roles traditionally reserved for whites, would seem to be exactly
this sort of “poodle dog” that Wright criticizes. But author Walter Mosley offers a different perspective in
his introduction to Black Pulp:

I am more than happy to read
about the history and psychology of oppression, the disenfranchisement of our
culture and the overwhelming power of capital—but these revelations are poor
fare if I cannot also imagine a different world and a different life where the
chains of the modern world can be shrugged (9-10).

In a podcast interview
promoting the collection, Mosley told a story about his father, who grew up
reading and loving the pulps and eventually tried to submit a story of his own
and never got a response. Mosley
then says that a year later, his father found a magazine that contained what
was basically his story and “he realized that he was going to forever be
excluded from this world. … This is a property that we’re reclaiming” (Pulped! Ep. 18). And the stories within the collection
do fit one of Wright’s qualifications that every story “should carry within its
lines, implied or explicit, a sense of the oppression of the Negro people, the
danger of war, of fascism, of the threatened destruction of culture and
civilization; and, too, the faith and necessity to build a new world.”

The lack of speculative fiction
from black voices is not necessarily surprising. In “Futurist Fiction & Fantasy,” Gregory E. Rutledge
posits an explanation for why there is a dearth of black voices in science
fiction and fantasy, which could also be extended to pulp fiction as well:

Wealth and security generate
zones of freedom to indulge in speculative thought, reading, and writing. …
Neither Black communities in Africa nor in the African diaspora, long
encumbered with sociopolitical and socioeconomic travails, has had the
opportunity to acquire the critical momentum to make speculative fiction a
broad phenomenon (240).

Rutledge also notes two other
problems raised previously: the low opinion of pulp fiction held by the
literary establishment as well as the racism prevalent in the industry for some
time:

Given the tendency of many
literary scholars, Black and otherwise, to think of FFF as hedonistic, and the
systemic racism of the FFF industry that persisted for many years, among other
things, the resulting cosmology of constraint limited and limits the
exploratory aspirations of many (diasporic) Africans (236).

As Wright noted, black writers
wanted to be taken seriously by the literary establishment and were rewarded
with little more than condescension.
Had there been more black writers producing non-literary fiction in the
form of the pulps, the chances are great they would have been regarded at a
lower status than the oft-derided white pulp authors. However, like Mosley, Rutledge points out the appeal this
kind of fiction has for black readers:

This link between Otherness and the otherworld phenomenon
of both fantasy and futurist fiction is something with which many persons of
African descent may identify.
Relegated early to the position of exotic Other, Africans and their descendants have been marked as the
primitive for centuries (237).

It has already been demonstrated
how Burroughs contributed to this relegation of blacks as Other, and fiction written from that point of view, fiction that
can transport black readers into another world, could very well help illuminate
legitimate and pressing concerns among the black community.

Another problem in the
publication of a work such as Black Pulp lies
in what Werner Sollors called the belief in ethnic exclusivity:

This attitude is quite common
in ethnic studies today. It is
based on the assumption that experience is first and foremost ethnic. Critics should practice cultural
relativism and stick to their own turfs (based, of course, on descent), since
an unbridgeable gulf separates Americans of different ethnic backgrounds… “You
will never understand me. Don’t
you understand?”—is the gesture with which cultural interaction seems to
function… (12-13)

Michael Awkward also criticized
such an approach in “Race, Gender, and the Politics of Reading”:

Taking traditional readings of
Afro-American literature to their logical extremes, the black experience
represents the hermeneutic tie that binds Afro-American writer and critic and
the hermetical seal that protects black texts from penetration by uninformed
and potentially racist white readers (9).

While Sollors and Awkward are
mostly discussing literary criticism as opposed to the fiction itself, their
ideas can also be applied to the world of fiction. Indeed, the attitude of an impenetrability does exist: “It
was commonly believed that European-American FFF readers would not pay to read
about the doings of Black characters” (Rutledge 239). With the racism present in the industry and the past
treatment, why would black authors and readers even want to be part of such an establishment? What possible significance could a story about a white
aristocrat raised in the jungle have to a black reader in the modern day? Or even in the past?

It is, of course, nonsense to
believe that there is absolutely nothing to take away, or no possible way to
write a story about a black Tarzan.
After all, Depression-era Montana is far removed from feudal Japan,
which is far removed from the Old West and a modern-day high school. Yet Dashiell Hammett’s novel, Red Harvest, was adapted into Akira
Kurosawa’s samurai film, Yojimbo,
which was also adapted into the Italian-made western film A Fistful of Dollars, and the story was also recently moved into a
twenty-first century high school in the film Brick. The same story,
spanning different eras, cultures, and countries, and yet it fits in each
one.

This is true in Saunders’
story, “Mtimu.” As this is just a
short story, it is understandably shorter than Tarzan of the Apes and much of Mtimu’s origins are told in brief as
opposed to the expounded form we get of Tarzan’s origins. But here we have a man raised by
ape-like people, a love interest from a “civilized” world, an elder “civilized”
man who serves as mentor to the jungle hero, and other savage peoples who
inhabit the land. But Saunders
differentiates them from their roots in Tarzan
of the Apes in a number of ways.
While Jane Porter in Tarzan of the
Apes was a stereotypically proper, upper-class American woman, relegated to
the status of a damsel in distress, Enid Brown is an African American pilot who
crashes in the jungle while attempting a non-stop solo flight from Egypt to
South Africa that would make her “the first woman pilot to have accomplished
that feat—and the first colored woman in the bargain” (Saunders 81). When in danger, Enid maintains her
cool, unlike Jane, who is reduced to hysterics.

Alpheus Wilson was a black
professor of botany in Georgia before embarking on an expedition to “darkest
Africa” in order to search for a rare plant. He came to live in a village in a remote part of the Congo and
met a young orphan named Yeke.
After a slaver gang attacked the village, Alpheus escaped with the child
until they were found by the Soko, a tribe of ape people who allowed the pair
to live with them and Yeke grew to become Mtimu as he’s called by the natives,
a term which means “wild man” (110).
Unlike Tarzan, Mtimu was not granted a superhuman ability to understand
languages, but learned them through Alpheus’ tutoring, grounding Mtimu’s story
in a more realistic setting than Tarzan’s. The closest comparison there is for Alpheus in Tarzan of the Apes is D’Arnot, who
teaches Tarzan how to speak French.
Within two days, Tarzan is able to converse in the language. D’Arnot is anxious not only to return
to civilization, but also to “civilize” Tarzan, chiding him for his preference
of raw meat over cooked and proper eating habits: “You must not eat like a
brute, Tarzan, while I am trying to make a gentleman of you. MON DIEU! Gentlemen do not thus—it is terrible” (Burroughs Ch.
25). It is also from D’Arnot that
Tarzan discovers his heritage in the form of Lord Greystoke’s diary (written in
French). But even before D’Arnot
reads the diary, he suspects Tarzan’s true heritage: “Tarzan…you are pure man,
and, I should say, the offspring of some highly bred and intelligent parents”
(Ch. 25). D’Arnot recognizes an
inborn nobility in Tarzan and wants to show the world the gentleman that exists
inside the jungle hero. But
Alpheus is quite different from D’Arnot.
The Frenchman is eager to return to his home and to the
civilization. Alpheus, however, understands
that he does not belong there:

“Would you like to come back to
America, Professor, and share what you have discovered here?” Enid asked after
her narrative wound down.

“Never!” Wilson replied
emphatically (Saunders 113-114).

This exchange comes about after
Enid has told Alpheus of what has transpired in America since he began his
expedition—she tells him of World War I, prohibition, and the continuing
struggle of blacks against segregation.
Alpheus seems to realize that the plights he encountered years earlier
are still present: “It was 1905—a new century. But the notion of a Negro leading a scientific journey was
unthinkable to most—including, sad to say, more than a few Negroes (109). Whereas D’Arnot has a home in France
and a respected position as a Naval Officer, Alpheus realizes that civilization
holds no attraction for him any longer.
Despite his education and his position as a professor, he would still be
regarded as a second-class citizen, and Alpheus instead prefers the life he has
built for himself in Africa—where he has a son in Mtimu and is respected and
held in high esteem by the Soko.

Perhaps most interesting is the
depiction of Lulama, who parallels the Mbongans from Tarzan of the Apes.
Like the Mbogans, Lulama is a native serving the white man and at first,
she is depicted as somewhat savage in nature. The goal of Bailey, the white villain of the story, is to
capture Mtimu and Enid and present them in a freak show as the Missing Link and
his mate. However, he notes that
Enid’s face and body would need to be scarred beyond recognition and that “He
would teach Lulama the skills necessary to perform those grisly tasks, which he
considered beneath him, but suitable for a savage. ‘And you’d enjoy every minute of it, wouldn’t you?’ the
animal catcher whispered to the native woman. Lulama remained silent” (100). But later, after Bailey is killed by Mtimu, a new side of
Lulama stands revealed:

“Bad man,” Lulama said,
speaking Bailey’s tongue for the first time. “He come to my village. Save my father, who was healer, from lion. Spirits say we owe him. He make my people, the Uthama, his
dogs. Make us do things…learn
things…wear strange clothes…all for him.
We could not kill him…because of debt. Spirits angry…if we not pay.” Then she looked at Mtimu. “You kill Bai-ley.
I…Lulama…free now” (116).

Lulama is not the savage she
may have appeared to be at first, she is simply a woman enslaved by the debt
she owes to Bailey. This provides
a sharp contrast to Newsinger’s depiction of the contrast between Tarzan and
the Mbongans: “Tarzan is shown as having mastered his savage environment, as
having risen above it like some sort of demi-god, whereas the blacks have
succumbed and have become part of it” (61-62). But in “Mtimu,” Lulama and the Uthama are forced into this
savage stereotype by their harsh master.
Bailey is in fact the true savage, “the pitiless white man” as Mtimu
refers to him (Saunders 108).

There are also significant
differences between Tarzan and Mtimu, despite their similarities. Mtimu is of the jungles himself as he
is an African native, and so he lacks Tarzan’s aristocratic heritage. Despite this supposed deficit, Mtimu
proves capable of learning English
and speaking it fluently, even affecting Alpheus’ southern accent
(103). Both Tarzan and Mtimu are
feared by the natives, but only in the case of Tarzan is the fear
justified. Not only in Tarzan of the Apes, but numerous other
tales, “one of [Tarzan’s] principle diversions was the baiting of the blacks”
(Newsinger 63). Mtimu, however, is
different: “The natives fear him as much as they do the Soko, even though he
returns to safety anyone who wanders too deeply into the wild” (110) is what
Alpheus tells Enid about the view the surrounding natives have of Mtimu. Unlike Tarzan, who despises the natives
and sees them as marks to steal from, victims of pranks, or sometimes far more
vicious torture, Mtimu treats all as equal. He sees himself as a protector, not only of his home, but
also of those who may face danger should they wander too deeply.

While Burroughs did not seem in
his personal life to hold negative racial beliefs, as noted by Berglund: “My
purpose is not to label Burroughs a racist; in fact, his rather positive
personal record of intercultural and interracial relationships might suggest
otherwise” (59), it cannot be denied that his prose definitely appears racist
in tone, particularly to a modern-day reader. Nevertheless, his stories can still serve as an inspiration
to modern-day writers and readers, including black ones such as Saunders and
Mosley. Without Tarzan of the Apes, Saunders likely
would never have composed a response as engrossing as “Mtimu” and we might
never have a collection as entertaining as Black
Pulp. The pulp works of the
past were certainly written for the target audience of the time: white, working
class men. But this does not limit
the potential reach they could have.
As Mosley stated so wonderfully in his introduction: “Pulp fiction, in
many cases, is the second movement in the dialectic of inner transition. It is the antithesis of what is
expected and the stepping stone to true freedom” (9). Mosley’s introduction makes a profound argument for
escapism, an opportunity to take what we know of the real world, and weave it
into a fantastical world of adventure, where larger-than-life heroes and
villains clash in cataclysmic tussles.
We need not be bound by pulp’s racial prejudices of the past in order to
move it into a new era, nor do the shortcomings of some of the tales mean the
medium as a whole is without any merit.